Caesura
by Cartographical
Summary: What do their memories of Jerry Tyson and a field full of flying pumpkins have in common? Three-shot.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: So many thanks to Jess, Julie, Laura, and Sarah for picking up their ice axes and strapping on their crampons and clambering up the gigantic disapproving glacial wall of ice that is my attitude toward everything I write. Thanks also to all of the other lovely, terrifying people who so very helpfully nudged me (with their hunting knives) to get this thing done. I think we're looking at a total of three chapters that should hopefully be up fairly quickly.

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He startles awake from a too-real dream, a darkened bridge and a gunshot and her throaty dying moans echoing up from the cold concrete. Pulse hammering, he reaches toward her, brushing her hair back from her cheek. He can't quite get the air he needs, feels the walls spinning in, the darkness coiling tight, looping around his chest. He jerks up, twists to his knees and yanks the curtains back, tries to gather some kind of comfort from the moon-bright night outside the RV's windows.

He feels a skittering over his forearm, a light, cool touch, and then her voice, lilting over his name in a soothing murmur. "You okay?" Her fingers trail along the bones of his wrist, bump over his knuckles.

"Fine," he says, throat thick, the air still closing in, wrapping more and more tightly, a noose around his neck, and out there, out there somewhere, is the man who -

"Hey." Her murmur drags him back into the present, clarifies the congealing oxygen, pulls him toward the reality of the moonlight glancing off the sharp edges of her cheekbones.

He stays on his knees, hovering above her, his lungs expanding and collapsing too quickly, the suffocating spin still threatening to close back in.

"What was it?"

He pauses, tries to swallow it back, but the words expand in his chest, swell up and out of his throat without a conscious effort, the deepest parts of him responding, as always, to her husked hybrid of command and question. "The bridge. With Tyson. You didn't –" The darkness is thickening again, a cloying thing that sticks all but those six words in the back of his throat, choking him.

She presses up onto her elbows, then slowly rises to her knees beside him. "I had a dream earlier," she offers softly. "When you were in holding, when I read those emails to you, one by one. The look in your eyes. And it wasn't – it wasn't even really a dream, right?" Her voice is hoarse, clogged by an ache he doesn't even know how to begin to erase. "Just a memory."

He reaches out, covers the dry skin of her elbow with his palm, skates his index finger along the tense line of her tricep. "You should have woken me."

She shakes her head, shuffles closer to him on her knees until her body is melts into his. "I wanted you to sleep." He sighs, nods, rests his nose on the crown of her head, breathes her in until he feels the knots inside his stomach begin to loosen.

The five days since the bridge have been a whirl of sleepless nights and hollow days, an echo of Tyson in every corner of the loft, the shadow of the killer in the stark line of every sidewalk. It would have helped, being at the precinct, throwing himself into finding justice for another victim, but Gates was more than firm about Beckett's week of paid leave following what she'd not entirely incorrectly called a "life-threatening hostage situation that resulted in a not-insignificant head injury" and the "discharging of a round of bullets resulting in the (not even remotely proven, Castle can't help but mentally add) death of a suspect."

It had been an odd type of relief when Paula had called him with a last-minute publicity opportunity for the weekend, a celebrity stint as an announcer for a pumpkin-flinging festival in Delaware that would have the unintended benefit of letting him escape the city for forty-eight hours. If he'd had any doubts about Beckett's residual issues, they were erased by how quickly she'd agreed to go with him, how eagerly she'd jumped on the opportunity to hop a flight and rent a luxury RV and drive through cornfields to the middle of a deserted stretch of the east coast.

He's not sure how long they stay on their knees, but eventually he pulls himself together enough to stroke a hand along the curve of her side, trail his fingers over the ridge of her hip. She shakes her head slowly, a rhythmic motion against his chin.

"That's not sleep," she chastises, but he can hear the husk of her tone, a different, deeper rasp than when she described her dream.

"Overrated."

"Castle, your guest commentating will never live up to Stephen King's if you don't get at least one decent night of rest."

She makes it easier for him to drag the pieces of himself back into some semblance of order. "I can't believe you're comparing me to Stephen King when we're in bed together. There's only one thing you can do that will assuage my wounded manhood."

Her finger suddenly jabs into his side. "He's the one you're stepping in for, Castle. And you're the one who talked for twenty minutes on the flight down here about how the coverage is airing on the Science Channel and how you're a vital cog in the vast and intricate machine of the knowledge of mankind."

"Ouch, Beckett, I think that was my kidney." He skates his hand up under the edge of her shirt, tries to let the heat of her skin burn off the icy shards of the dream that still cling to him. "Really, I don't know how I'll sleep without some kind of intensive therapy. You're holding the fate of nearly a hundred thousand Punkin Chunkin devotees in your very capable hands."

She must hear whatever's beneath it – his too-naked need for the most visceral kind of proof that she's still alive and whole - because she's letting him pause for only long enough to pull the curtains closed before she presses him into the firm mattress, mouthing her way along his jawbone. "Be fast," she chastises as she skids her hand up under his shirt, "I don't want Paula to call and start yelling like that one time over the summer when you barely made it to that book signing."

"It wasn't my fault, you were just so shiny and new and…" He loses his train of thought as her mouth trails lower, lower, and finally his world collapses to nothing but the flame of her mouth and hands and body.


	2. Chapter 2

He finally finds her sitting in a folding chair in a circle of six scruffy, middle-aged men at the end of the line of trebuchets. The sun is just starting to perch on the horizon, stretching shadows and casting a golden light across the wide, dusty field, and the play of it across the waves of her ponytail, the arc of her neck, the curve of her cheek, is enough to make his lungs stumble over an inhale. A smile bursts across her face; he can just catch the edge of her upturned lips, a flash of her teeth, the joyful crinkle at the corner of her eye. The six guys are all unabashedly titled toward her, the cans of PBR forgotten in their hands, a large grill billowing smoke, unattended, behind them.

"Hey," Castle says, walking up behind her. The lot of them rise to their feet before he can wave at them to stay sitting.

"Castle." There's a trill of joy underpinning her tone that she keeps quieter in Manhattan, a looseness to her stance that never fails to make him want to drag her against his body. It would all seem entirely normal, utterly perfect, except for the wound on her cheekbone – still an angry red weal, two lines that intersect in the vague shape of an _x _that set his heart kicking against his ribs every time he sees them, that send his brain spinning off into the cold dark night, to the shadowed outline of her body forced back into Tyson's, the small and desperate sounds of her struggle to press herself away from him. A little less stupid, dumb luck, a little less –

"Guys, this is Rick Castle. Castle, this is Tom, Joe, Al, Bryan, Chris, and Paul." The introductions drag him back. He lets his eyes skip over the circle of weathered faces, pinning names to expressions. He can't do his usual trick of matching clothes to names, since they're all wearing violent orange t-shirts with the words _Ophelia's Revenge _scrawled across the front of them. It's cold enough out that he and Beckett are both wearing leather jackets, but the men seem unaffected by the temperature. "They own Ophelia's Revenge." She gestures with her chin toward a huge wooden contraption painted the same fierce orange as their shirts. Like many of the hundreds of machines lined up in the wide field, the enormous quasi-catapult looks more like an exotically painted mechanism of medieval warfare than anything else.

"Third place today in adult trebuchets," Al announces proudly, dragging over a chair from behind the grill and fishing a PBR out of the cooler. "Chris, if you don't keep half an eye on the ribs…"

"Got it," Chris says, grinning apologetically as he walks to the grill and everyone else sinks back into their chairs. Castle drags the extra one over next to Beckett. "Kate had me distracted."

"You had yourself distracted," Beckett chastises, a friendly lilt in her tone that puts him even more at ease with the group. He knows from the texts they exchanged during his brief breaks that she's been here since lunch, somehow swiftly adopted by the team of friends from Ohio after a brief conversation involving their appreciation of her impressively heeled boots and her admiration for the vibrant color of their shirts.

"She does that," Castle says, snagging his finger under the pull-tab to open the oversized can. He gestures with his beer toward their chunker, hoping that a day of guest announcing for a sport about which he knows absolutely nothing has leant his compliment a certain amount of authority. "It's an impressive machine."

Al glances up at Castle as he flips another rack. "Thanks. We've been tinkering with her in one form or another for the past five years. Made her entirely from trees from our properties. Not like some of those other machines you see over there, imported metal contraptions."

Castle casts a sidelong glance at Beckett as he takes a deep drink of the slightly bitter, watery drink, the cold fizzling through his coat and chest. He immediately chokes, the beer shooting painfully up his nasal passage. "Why are you holding a baby turtle?" he sputters, coughing through the painful tingle of the carbonation.

She rolls her eyes, lets out an amused huff as he struggles to catch his breath. "This is Ophelia," she says, lifting up the small green animal. "Well. Ophelia the Second."

"The Second?" he asks, not sure how to prioritize the questions pinging through his brain. There's something – it's a baby _turtle_, and yes, it's oddly adorable, but there's nothing that excuses the clench of his chest at the gentle way Beckett cradles the tiny thing in the crook of her elbow.

"Ophelia the First is still with us," says Paul, "but travelling makes her depressed." The man's matter of fact intonation combined with the subject matter of a despondent reptile is an eerie echo of Ryan. Castle suddenly considers pulling together a team– he'd have to get a place upstate, of course, with a clear couple miles where they could shoot the pumpkins, and he'd have to research what goes into building one of the machines, but with Beckett and Ryan and Esposito – and Patterson, maybe, flinging pumpkins through the air seems like just his kind of thing – and Langley, since the guy has an engineering degree from MIT…

Beckett shoves her knee hard against his thigh and shakes her head, as though she can actually see the direction in which his thoughts are spinning.

Joe snorts. "Like you can tell when a turtle is depressed."

"Well, the kid swears you can," Paul defends, "and _you_ can try explaining to a fourteen year old girl that her turtle's not excessively restless and lethargic."

Beckett trails her finger over the back of the turtle's – Ophelia's – shell, a gentle, careful touch that makes him swallow. "Ophelia the Second doesn't seem to mind."

"Yeah, the kid figured we'd get a baby and start her travelling early, which is all well and good, but you'd think she'd stick around to see how the thing was actually doing."

"Or to watch the chunk, since we let her name the damn trebuchet after that reptile," Chris adds, grinning over Beckett and the turtle in her lap.

Paul shakes his head. "She and a kid from the Pachelbel's Cannon team act like they're long-lost soul mates – they only get to see each other once a year the chunk, so she gets here, bolts a half mile down the field to the Adult Air section, and I'm lucky if catch her again by Sunday morning."

Bryan shakes his head, a gruff, affectionate quirk to his lips. "Kate really did us a favor – we tend to degenerate around here without a calming female influence, and Ophelia's taken a real shine to her."

It doesn't take a genius to see that he doesn't only mean Ophelia, but it's impossible to blame them, not when Beckett is relaxed and smiling in the aureate light. He's constantly stunned by the way she communicates with victims' families, with suspects, the alternate softness and steel she projects, but he so rarely gets to see her interact with people outside the confines of her job. It's enthralling, the way she has them orbiting around her, tilting slightly at her, the way bits of her smile break off and refract onto everyone's expressions.

"You like your first punkin chunk?" Tom asks.

"I had no idea people spent so much time putting pumpkins into gigantic machines and shooting them thousands of feet through the air," Castle says. "And in so many creative ways."

"Just six," Al says.

"Seven," Paul counters.

Tom starts ticking them off. "Cannons, centrifugals, catapults, trebuchets, torsions, human powered, centrifugal human powered."

The group immediately degenerates into a boisterous argument over whether one can _really _call centrifugal human powered a different category of chunker. Beckett glances over to Castle, shifts the turtle so that she can lightly rest her fingers on his kneecap. He barely catches the quality of her look, the concerned flick of her eyes over his body. He tries a gentle, reassuring smile in response. He's fine, better than, but he's tired, he's tired and there were two or three times over the course of the day that he started thinking of all the ways anyone could blend into the crowd, the hundred thousand different disguises someone could use to casually walk up to Beckett, and she wouldn't have been expecting it and he would have never even known that anything was wrong until the end of the day.

He hopes his texts didn't get overbearing, but the sudden steadiness of her gaze tells him she'll forgive him the extra contact. He can still feel the aching tug of his own wound at his temple; he still sometimes catches her glancing over at him, a mixture of panic and relief inscribed into the tight lines of her jaw.

"Ribs're done!" Al calls, effectively shutting down the group's argument and Castle's wandering thoughts. Beckett and he both shift, but Al's already preempting any negative response they might have had. "You'll stay, of course – we made too much anyway, and the six of us tend to get sick of each other before the drive over here's halfway finished."

"True enough," Joe says, passing Beckett a plate and effectively cutting off Castle's half-formed protest. The group lines up behind the grill and Castle shifts to join them, following up at the end of the loose line, watching the men pile obscene amounts of meat onto their plates.

"Hey," Al says, a quiet rumble, nudging of the tongs into the side of Castle's wrist. "She okay?"

Castle unconsciously glances toward Beckett, who's turned and engaged in an intense conversation with Bryan. Her plate is balanced precariously on her knees, and she's shifted the baby turtle to her left arm to use her right to eat. "Hm?" he hums, utterly distracted by her, by the clear, absorbed light of her eyes.

"She seems alright now, but she had some edgy moments today. That and that nasty bash on her cheek - Paul and Tom were convinced it was you, but I think we all could tell it wasn't from the way she relaxed as soon as you got here."

Castle sighs, feels the combination of worry and validation lodge deeply in his chest. The connotations of Manhattan aren't the issue, not that he ever thought they were. It's not even really Tyson, or at least not just Tyson. It's the reality of being hunted, the knowledge that she's only a tenuous bluff away from another sniper's bullet, the inextricability of his fate from hers and hers from his. "Rough week," he grunts, the paper plate dipping in his grasp as Al drops the ribs onto it. _Rough year and a half_, he adds, keeping it in his head as his eyes scan the lines of her face, the set of her shoulders, looking for hints of the week's stress on her body, anything other than the vibrant, slanted _x _on her cheek. But here, now, she looks easy, happy, free, gesturing with a half-eaten rib at an utterly smitten-looking punkin chunker, a baby turtle crawling down her thigh, her breathing slow and even and her mouth still quirked into a half smile.

"I'd say take care of her, but anyone with half a brain'd take one look at you looking at her and know it'd be redundant."

"Appreciate the sentiment, though," Castle murmurs before drifting back to her, folding down beside her so that his knee bumps against her thigh, his elbow jostling her forearm.

"Missed you," he murmurs once her conversation with Bryan breaks.

"Don't get soft on me," she says, an easy smile stretched across her face.

"No danger of _that_," he growls, reveling in easy laugh that shivers through her body, the happy gleam of her eyes in the dwindling light.


	3. Chapter 3

He's watching as Beckett deftly closes the metal of her handcuffs around Castle's wrist. The binoculars let him focus, allow him to absorb the parts of her he hasn't noticed before – the fluid movement of her long fingers, pianists fingers, as they thread the metal through the top of the headboard; the arc of her eyelashes, the dark, stark way they frame the intent light in her irises, the opaque arousal pooling in her pupils. Castle's body, covered in only a thin pair of black silk boxers, arches off the bed toward her, and the binoculars trip over the flex of his biceps, the rapid rise and fall of his chest, the strain of his abdominal muscles, before focusing back on her, on the molten motion of her thigh over his, the easy lift and roll of her hips as she straddles his stomach, the shift and sway of her red nightgown over her upper thighs.

She pulls the silk up slowly, tantalizingly, exposing inch after inch of skin to the soft lamplight of the room. The binoculars stutter over the shadowed edge of her hip, follow the line of her pelvis into the flat plane of her abdomen, pause for a beat on the quiver of her stomach muscles, track the trail of red silk up the center of her torso as she lifts the nightgown over her body. They stop at the center of her sternum, the plane between the curves of her breasts, the dark circle of a scar, before drifting up to the sharp edge of her collarbone. The view dips down to the slope of her breast as her body starts rolling, then trails back down her stomach, over the shadow of her navel, the flexing, clenching muscles of her obliques, and then down, down to –

"It's okay, you're okay," he hears, a quiet murmur in his ear, the light pressure of her index finger against his lips.

He's pushing away, propelling his body up and off the bed before his mind can catch up, stumbling several steps and yanking the door open and tripping out of the suffocating air of the RV. The stars wheel above him and the dirt pitches below; he feels his knees start to buckle, his body lurch, his chest tighten with the spinning, nauseating inability to stick his feet to solid ground.

A loud, disjointed yell permeates the dull roar in his head; he jerks straighter, whirls around, trying to get his bearings, but it's pitch black save the spinning stars and the stark outline of flames in the distance, a tangled nightmare of darkness and flashes of light and staccatos of shouting that are no better than the collapsing sides of the RV.

He jerks back, nearly falling to his knees, when something brushes against his shoulders, but then there's a firm hand at his waist and the soft brush of lips against his jaw. "Come on," she's saying against his skin, "We're okay."

The wash of her breath against his cheek straightens out the stars, steadies the ground beneath his feet, brings the cold snap of November air, the crisp scent of autumn into sharp relief. The flames solidify into small bonfires; the shouting into groups of midnight revelers engaging in boisterous, drunken discussions. The harsh clang of their voices still grate against him, make his muscles tense in an uncomfortable, involuntary spasm.

He sucks in a deep breath, and before he can release it her fingers are gently wrapping a blanket around his shoulders and the ball of her foot is tapping his calf up and forward so that he's stepping into his battered pair of Nikes. He glances at her, takes in as much as he can of her in the starlight, his oversized hoodie enveloping her torso, her feet hastily shoved into a pair of sneakers, her hand clutching a mason jar of –

"What is that?" His voice sounds rough, unused.

"Moonshine," she says, wrapping the fingers of her free hand around his and tugging him forward, starting across the open field, away from the noise and the bonfires.

He huffs a strangled laugh. "Detective Beckett. I never pegged you for a possessor of illegal substances."

She kicks her toe along his calf. "Al gave it to me before we left. Wouldn't take no for an answer. You were busy alternately badgering Bryan about the best kind of tree with which to build a trebuchet and harassing Paul about the finer points of turtle care."

"I really just think they have a good thing going," he says, managing to sound almost normal.

"You already have a full-time hobby," she chastises.

"Writing does suck up a lot of my time."

She lifts her foot again, gets him in the anklebone as they walk through the field. "I meant stalking me, you idiot," she gruffs, the careful, gentle clasp of her fingers around his belying her words.

"More than a hobby," he counters, because they've at least established _that _by now. He can come back from everything surrounding Tyson, everything except her pushing him away for his own good.

She dips her head, quirks her lips briefly in acknowledgement. "More than just a stalker, too," she murmurs, nudging her shoulder gently into his.

He dredges it up, the banter only a little affected. "If anything, the scenario's reversed. Are you leading me out here to put me out of my misery?"

"You got me. I secretly arranged this whole weekend to set up the perfect crime." She beams at him, a bright smile that flashes through the darkness.

He cocks his head. "I feel like you would be the very first suspect."

"Exactly. It would be _too _obvious. I'm a homicide detective. Everyone'd be sure I could cover my tracks better than that."

He gives an exaggerated sigh. "And here I thought things were going so well."

Her fingers close hard around his in acknowledgement, an assenting hum in the back of her throat as she leads him on in darkness and silence, on until the shouts of the partiers are just background murmurs, until the flames of the small bonfires are only flickers in the distance.

They stop near the edge of a copse of trees. Barely visible in the darkness, half a mile away, he can see the stark outlines of some of the bigger air cannons, blocking out thin strips of stars that twinkle with a ferocious kind of brightness.

"Come on," she says, maneuvering herself under his arm so that the blanket drapes over them both, then tugging him gently down onto the ground, sitting pressed so closely that her hip digs harshly into his thigh. She twists the lid off the moonshine, takes a long swallow. "If you'd told me six months ago I'd be here…" she starts, lets it trail off as she passes the jar to him.

He wraps his fingers around the cold glass, rests the ridged edge against his lips, swallows. It burns clear and bright though his mouth, his throat, a flickering fire that echoes the starlight. "Drinking moonshine with me in Delaware in a dark field lined with catapults?"

She chuffs, a short, airy breath, tilts her head and brushes her lips along the line of his jaw. "Yes."

He tips the jar, takes a longer, deeper swig. "Me too," he husks, his voice rough from the drink, from her, from all of it. He slides his hand under her the hem of sweatshirt, rubs his fingers slowly over the smooth heat of her skin.

She tilts back until she's leaning on her elbows, then snags the jar from him, taking a long, slow swallow. "Stars like this were always the best things to make me feel better on a bad day. A night like tonight, you can let it swallow you up. Drift along on the current of your own insignificance."

He holds desperately still, traps his breath on an inhale, feels his lungs strain up against his sternum, his fingers halt against her skin.

"It kept me alive, that summer. Lying on the ground outside that cabin, staring up into the sky and knowing that my body could leach molecule by molecule into the dirt and the stars would keep on shining."

Words spin uselessly in his head. He snags the jar from her and drinks again, longer, wanting to make it cloudier, wanting to dull the pulsing pain of her words. "Not for me," he finally says.

She continues like she hasn't heard him. "It's not like that in the city. The humanity's too omnipresent. You can't get any perspective, can't lose yourself in the stars. It starts to close in on you, tighter and tighter, until there's not even enough room for your lungs to expand so you can breathe."

"You should be the writer," he says, passing the jar to her.

She tilts her head and stares up at him, waiting, waiting.

"The thought that you –" he breaks off, shaking his head, his mind reeling away from the idea before he can even fully form it.

"That I'm not safe," she says, matter of fact, too direct.

"Whether or not Tyson's dead," he adds, the words leaving him in a rush.

He watches her eyes slowly close at the veiled reference. When she opens them again there's a darkness in them that has nothing to do with the moonless night. "Nothing for it," she finally says, her voice low and bleak and angry. "Nothing for it with that or with Tyson."

This is the part of her she doesn't let him see in New York. The part that's rubbed raw from living with a deal that makes her sick. The part that insists that Tyson's dead. The part that follows him to Delaware for a weekend instead of trying everything possible to sneak back into the precinct. He told her once that what made her so extraordinary was that she wouldn't back down, that she pushed through every wall that got in her way. But now she's stopped, at least with this one wall, and he can't decide if he's more worried that she'll cease pushing altogether or that she'll fling herself headfirst back into it all.

He leans back next to her, swigs the moonshine, lets it burn away the tangle of thoughts as he stares up at the sky, loses himself in the thousands of flickering far-away suns. "Do you know we're seeing stars that are twenty quintillion miles away right now?"

"No," she murmurs, her voice still too low. He hears her suck in a long breath of air, trying for him. "It's – freeing. All that endless distance."

He nudges his nose against her cheek, tilts his head slightly to watch the sky once more. "It makes me feel tired. I don't…" He lets it go, again, lets the words unravel into the dark air. He knows what she's saying; he's felt it, too, the limitless possibilities of a star-studded night, but now it's just pressing up against his bone-deep weariness.

"I could count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams," she murmurs at him, the words vibrating huskily in the back of her throat as she passes him the moonshine and cards her fingers through his hair, setting up a steady, easy rhythm that has his eyes sliding slowly shut.

He can't help the smile that rolls over his lips, can't help the way his body cants into hers as his muscles loosen under her touch. He forces his eyes back open, traces the shadowed arc of her cheekbone with his gaze. "It's oddly arousing to hear you express my feelings with a Shakespeare quote."

"Blame the baby turtle." He gets as far as opening his mouth before she cuts him off. "And do not even _suggest _an Ophelia the Third."

"But she made you so _poetic_." He swigs the moonshine again; the stars spin overhead, but a lazy, peaceful sway as the pleasant liquid burn of the moonshine heats his blood. In the distance, one of the fires flickers into darkness.

The rhythm of her hand in his hair drags him down, unweaves the tension of his muscles so that he's sinking into the ground, melting into the blanket near the sharp edge of her shoulder, the angle of her hip, drifting into a half-consciousness, anchored to reality only by the heat of her body. A warmth over his lips drags him back, her tongue lazily tracing his lower lip. "Don't succumb to hypothermia, Castle," she murmurs against him when she finally pulls away.

She sits, and his body automatically follows hers until he's back up beside her. "Only because I can picture Gates' face when she reads the headline."

"'Popular Mystery Writer and Muse Found Frozen to Death in Delaware Punkin Chunkin Field.'"

"You didn't mention the moonshine." He finds he doesn't have to work so hard to dredge up a hopeful leer as he runs the tips of his fingers beneath the waistband of her leggings, feels her stomach clench under his touch. "Or the fact that we weren't wearing any pants." His chest tightens even as he says it, but there's something about the dark vastness of the field, the edge of the horizon where the trees run up into the stars, the sleepy, solid heat of the woman next to him, that sets him more at ease, that starts to uncoil the knots wound deep inside him.

"Absolutely not," she murmurs huskily into his ear.

It's the ability to live with it, he thinks, that's the hardest thing. The reconciliation of the danger and injustice of it all. The realization that they have no ability to fix it. The acceptance that, no matter what, the stars will wheel onward and that they'll spend their time beneath them doing what they can.

"Tell me?" she questions, low and careful, after they've sat in silence for far too long. She nudges the glass jar against his knuckles.

"Won't get me drunk enough to spill, Beckett," he says. "Same old, anyway." It's not, and he knows she knows it, but there are some nightmares she doesn't need to shoulder with him. Some burdens, at least, that he can spare her.

"I know what _will_ get you to spill."

He chokes on the moonshine he's swallowing, presses his forehead into her temple as he catches his breath, doesn't respond.

She slants her body further into his, and he can feel her torso rise and fall in a slow sigh. "Wanna go back?"

"No. Not yet." He turns his head against hers, rests his lips lightly against the corner of her mouth.

"You really do want us to freeze to death," she murmurs, but he can feel the affectionate smile that quirks her lips.

"I know how to stay warm," he says, and then she's twisting her body over and resting her mouth against his again, the shared heat of their breaths colliding in the space between them before he closes the gap, lets his lips brush over hers, leans back as she tilts forward, as her hands curl against his stomach and the moonshine lurches sideways out of his suddenly unfeeling fingers and his awareness channels to only the press of her tongue into his mouth. She tastes like the sharp burn of moonshine, like the cold edge of autumn air.

Time stretches and collapses in the darkness, so that he'll never be sure of how long they sit there, tangled against each other, of how long it is before he feels less tired, suddenly, at the thought of the dark and infinite stretch to the stars. "You ready?" she finally murmurs after a weighted eternity.

He pushes himself off the cold ground, wraps his hand around hers to pull her up, revels in her slow, unblinking smile. "Let's go."


End file.
